“When we make these games, we always try to keep in mind that it would be great to see it be a franchise,” Evan Wells explained. “You invest so much time in developing the IP that it would be unwise to just say, ‘okay, this is going to be a one shot deal.’”

“Sometimes, that’s still the best decision to make. We certainly don’t plan out a trilogy or something with the whole arc in mind beforehand. But we knew that this genre, in particular, is a great one to serialize. So we wanted it to have its own self-contained story and have an ending, but we wanted to have this rich universe, too, with lots of interesting characters that Drake could continue to meet and interact with.”

“

When we make these games, we always try to keep in mind that it would be great to see it be a franchise.

“Also,” Christophe Balestra jumped in, “I remember specifically, at the end of Uncharted 1, everyone in the office. We had barely finished the game and they were all talking about doing a sequel. They were talking about all the stuff they wanted to do. Of the three-year process [making Drake’s Fortune], probably two years were spent just on trying to figure out the team and all the problems we had to crack and figuring out the hardware.”

“We were barely starting to get stuff working… We had nine months to make the game,” he continued. “And so there were some frustrations, because we knew we could do a lot more. We knew that we were barely touching the power of the PS3… It was pretty obvious that we would do a sequel, because everyone was already thinking about the stuff they could do to make the game better.”

“It was interesting to see the energy after Uncharted 1,” he admitted. “It was very different than other games, where when you finish the game you’re just exhausted and you want to go on vacation. Here, people were ready to go. It was a pretty obvious choice.”

Continuing the series made a lot of sense.

Amy Hennig remembered the days following Drake’s Fortune’s launch, when the team quickly focused on the sequel, a reflection of the game they really wanted the original to be, but simply didn’t have the time, means, or technology to execute on the vision.

“We did a little bit of noodling around just before the holidays [in 2007]…” she said. “I think the thing is that there was so much we wanted to do and couldn’t do. Like I said, we have that template document for what Uncharted is. We’ve only met the goals of half of it. There are so many things [left to do], such a rich sandbox. Things we could keep improving on, or things where it’s like, ‘we tried that set piece or that kind of gameplay, but it didn’t quite come off.’ You always want another at-bat.”

“

…we have that template document for what Uncharted is. We’ve only met the goals of half of it.

“So we already had so much that we were feeling like, ‘okay, we didn’t get to do that, but now we’re going to get to really dig in and do it.’ We were so excited, too… We launched right in, deciding that we wanted to tackle the tech of being able to have gameplay on a moving object. That was really motivated by the fact that one of the huge tropes you expect to see in action and adventure movies is that ability to have a fight on a moving train. We were like, ‘God, that would be so awesome.’”

“The only way we could do it,” she continued, “is by rewriting all of our systems, so that all of the characters, all the objects, all that stuff could operate on the moving terrain. The fact that we started everything [with] that idea… we had no story yet. We didn’t know why there was a train, where it was going, where it was going to end up, why [Drake’s] on it. Doesn’t matter. We just knew that that was going to be just kickass and we would make sure it was a core part of our story.”

“We could then sit down and really dig into [the story]. But something that substantial, you’d better decide [early]. If we’re going to do this, we’ve gotta start now. We’ve always said that was the first level we started [in Uncharted 2] and the last one we finished, because the tech for it was monumentally difficult. You have to get your programmers and your artists started trying to figure it out from day one.”

“But I think we were just motivated by that kind of stuff, the challenges of what we wanted to do. Feeling out what we’d done well [in Drake’s Fortune], what we wanted another shot at.”

“The thing is,” she continued, “what we’d gotten such good feedback about was the stuff that we were worried most about. Could we establish characters people had affection for and believed in as these real characters? It felt like that was pretty universally getting good feedback, even if there were other complaints about gameplay issues or technical issues. It felt like we were on the right track with that stuff, so why would you shift gears at that point? You just want to build on the foundation you’ve got.”

Developing Uncharted 2: Among Thieves forced Naughty Dog to approach Nathan Drake and his story in a different way, even if so much of the groundwork already existed from the previous game. For starters, Among Thieves didn’t just use motion capture; it actually used performance capture, meaning that everything -- including a character's voice -- was garnered in one go. While actors in Drake's Fortune did speak their lines in mo-cap, audio from those sessions didn't make it into the game. Among Thieves was a different story.

“

Could we establish characters people had affection for and believed in as these real characters?

“In Uncharted 2, we were getting sound and motion at the same time from the same actor,” Josh Scherr recalled. “You just can’t reproduce that [performance by having actors record their lines separately]. You can’t fake that. Now, we would go in and change a bunch of stuff. We would re-cut all the audio because we’re not doing facial capture. But the essence is still the same. It’s a believable performance where [motion and audio] are connected.”

These new tools and this new way of doing things at Naughty Dog continued to scare some of the old guard, but Scherr put it succinctly enough as to why it had to be that way. “It’s like being a doctor in some way. New procedures come out and you have to keep up with that stuff. Otherwise, you become the quaint country house call guy.”

“I think this is true for a lot of companies and a lot of engines,” he later said, “but if we go back now and look at Uncharted 1, compared to the sequels or The Last of Us, it’s just like, ‘oh my god.’ It’s hard to believe it’s on the same hardware. We didn’t even have a skin shader on Uncharted 1. Everyone looks like these waxen dolls. There’s no screen space ambient occlusion, so nothing looks like it’s really grounded in the environment at all…”

Uncharted 2 introduced new characters like Chloe, while bringing back old favorites like Sully.

“But I think once we survived Uncharted 1 and realized that we finally had gotten a handle on this thing, we could really go to town and start doing some of the things that we had talked about, but just did not have the time to do.”

“That desperate time, where people were falling by the wayside [during Drake’s Fortune’s development], people weren’t able to keep up,” Taylor Kurosaki jumped in. “Those who were there were just holding everyone around themselves up with them. I think that scrappiness is probably what led to Uncharted 2. We were just lean and strong and single-minded.”

“Well, thank God nobody had any expectations for Uncharted 1,” Tate Mosesian joked. “We actually delivered something that exceeded expectations, if there were any. It was weird. We’re Naughty Dog. It’s not like we’re some quiet boutique company that nobody knows about. But that was really the feeling we had when we were working on Uncharted 1. No one knows about us. The word’s not out. No one knows about this game. It just seemed all very under the radar and quiet.”

“

It was weird. We’re Naughty Dog. It’s not like we’re some quiet boutique company that nobody knows about.

“Then, we got some recognition after it came out, and then there was Uncharted 2… Once we had Uncharted 1 under our belt, we had a template and we had a whole shitload of stuff that we couldn’t do at the time, because all of the other constraints. A lot of what is in Uncharted 2 is just unrealized dreams from Uncharted 1…”

“…I believe Uncharted 2 is a lot better than Uncharted 1,” he later noted. “Not only that it looks better. It looks way better. But the paradigm shift [that occurred]. Now that we had this engine, we had things like diagnostic tools. We could actually look at debugging some of our tech. We could look at optimizing and maximizing this amazing PS3 hardware that we really didn’t even scratch the surface on. So we had time to do that.”

“We had more focus into those areas. We were able to make it look a shit-ton better, which improves the game experience. We were able to create a story with beats that [made] people… excited to get to the next one. This thing comes to a crescendo, and, ‘oh my god!’ But I can’t put my controller down because I want to move on to the next one. So [we] really found that formula there. [We] figured that out. So Uncharted 2 is amazing.”

Still, Naughty Dog itself needed to improve internally to make a game of Uncharted 2’s caliber. “We needed more,” Erick Pangilinan said. “We needed to be more efficient. We needed better tools. Between Uncharted 1 and 2, we rewrote a lot of things. We rewrote our lighting. We rewrote our physics. We rewrote AI. We improved the engine. We basically did everything over again.”

“But having the world known in Uncharted 2,” Reuben Shah interjected, “working on it and understanding the characters a little better, it did make things easier. You knew who Drake was at this point. Going into, ‘okay, he’s gonna be in this crazy train wreck sequence,” you had a better understanding of what that was. If that was in [Uncharted] 1, you’d be like, ‘uh, what do we do? What type of train cars? What type of this or that?’ That defined things for us, to make decisions more clear in Uncharted 2.”

Perhaps no one understood the pressure of making Uncharted 2 more than a newcomer to the team, Justin Richmond. Richmond joined Naughty Dog during Uncharted 2’s development – and went on to be a major part of the team that made Uncharted 3 – but when he came to Naughty Dog, he did so with limited experience in the industry.

Richmond is a product of Boston University’s film program, as well as the Vancouver Film School. His postgraduate degree is in 3D animation, making him a great fit for the world of gaming. Following graduation, he went to Backbone to work on the early PSP game Death Jr. before moving to another company, Blue Omega. Before long, he was at Naughty Dog, working on the much-anticipated sequel to Drake’s Fortune.

“

In Uncharted 2, we tried to create the illusion that it was a big action movie you were playing.

“There was a lot of pressure,” Richmond admitted. “We were trying to do a lot of stuff. We had started to crack the nut of how motion capture could be integrated with audio… So it was that, combined with, ‘how are we going to make an action movie that you can play?’ That was the directive that was handed down by [Naughty Dog’s leadership]. Making sure we stayed true to that.”

“It’s funny,” he continued. “The world has changed a lot since Uncharted 2, and I think some of the stuff we got away with in both 2 and 3, the world has changed so that we wouldn’t be able to do that again, or at least in the same exact way. But when we did it [at] that time, it was ground breaking.”

“In Uncharted 2, we tried to create the illusion that it was a big action movie you were playing,” Richmond explained. “We didn’t want every fall to kill you. A lot of the things we do are to make sure you don’t have to replay a segment too many times, particularly if it’s a narrative-based segment. We don’t want you to die 14 times trying to save Elena. We want you to save Elena the first time, because that feels awesome. Saving her the third time is… less interesting.”

Justin Richmond joined Naughty Dog during Uncharted 2's development.

“When we started doing Uncharted 2, we knew we had something going with Uncharted 1, or [the team that was already there] did. I certainly thought so, outside of the studio. Then Uncharted 2, getting that formula down, that was the whole project. It took a long time to figure out what was cool about collapsing handholds, what was cool about stuff falling apart… It’s the illusion of danger, right?”

“The thing is,” he continued, “if I touch it, it’s going to fall apart, but in reality you’re safe, right? That motivator worked for a couple of years. I think now it doesn’t work anymore. People are more sophisticated. Gamers have seen through that illusion now. You can no longer rely on that to up your emotional pace or change the motivations in the story, because people see through it. ‘Oh, this is nonsense, right? I realize that this thing is never going to fall and kill me. It’s always going to break the second I jump off of it.’ That stuff. It’s amazing how fast the industry has turned, how quickly people caught on to those tricks.”

But like with the original Uncharted, Naughty Dog didn’t quite know what it had with Uncharted 2 until a very specific time: E3 2009. It was there that the studio started getting feedback from critics and gamers alike, upping the ante on what was very easily the most exciting PlayStation 3-exclusive of the year.

“With Uncharted 2, we were a lot more strategic in how we aligned things,” Sam Thompson said. “We learned a lot of lessons with the first [Uncharted]. Had it not been for the stellar E3 that we had [in 2009], it would have been a different story. Uncharted 2 at E3 was this magical ride for us, where the stage demo at the press conference started it.”

“

…holy crap, this is huge. This is a huge game.

“We were smart enough – this was, again, something Evan had insisted on – having a lot of content to show, having multiplayer on the floor,” he continued. “Being able to show a little bit of co-op and having a different single-player level for the press, on top of what we showed at the press conference. I think it really showed just how far we had gone from 1 to 2. The emphasis on truly making this a summer blockbuster movie and putting Drake in this role of relatability and someone that people could identify with. It was just magical.”

Justin Richmond agreed. “Personally, I didn’t know what we had until E3,” he said, laughing. “I had an inkling. Well, it was weird, because I’d never worked on a game of this caliber before. I’d never worked at a triple-A developer before. I always had a sense of what a triple-A game was, and I knew I was working on something that was awesome. I knew that the game was going to be really cool. But I didn’t know what it was going to do at the end until E3.”

“Then it was like, “holy crap, this is huge. This is a huge game.’ Regardless of what it was going to sell, just the impact it was having on people writing about it. I’d never been part of anything like that before. It felt special, inside the studio. It was terrifying at the same time, because we finished that E3 demo and it was like, ‘wait, three-quarters of the game doesn’t look like that yet.’ Or maybe 50 percent of the game. It was a lot of hard work going from taking that one demo and the other two that we had and taking the rest of the game up to that level, and at the same time trying to do multiplayer.”

Uncharted 2 was Naughty Dog's first real foray into multiplayer.

“It was a lot of stuff where it was like, ‘we can’t do that! We gotta figure out a way!’ Then we were releasing the demo. We did the multiplayer live demo to test our net code. We’d never released a multiplayer game like that before. Jak X had some networking stuff, but nothing at the level we were trying to do. Realizing after E3, ‘oh my god, we have to change the way we’re doing stuff, it’s not working.’ All that kind of stuff. But E3 was the moment where I was like, ‘this is gonna be enormous.’ Even then, I don’t think it really hit me until a year later. ‘Wow, we did that. That was nuts.’ And by that point, we were already halfway through Uncharted 3.”

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves launched exclusively on PlayStation 3 in late 2009, and was a critical and commercial smash hit. It is considered by many – including IGN – to be the best game released on any platform that year. But even with the positivity of the game’s E3 showing didn’t prepare Naughty Dog for the seemingly infinite accolades that would be in store for them.

“You’re working on this stuff, and especially if you’re working on it piecemeal, in disparate parts, and it’s not necessarily actually being worked on sequentially. You have this level and this thing and this tech you’re working on, this thing over here, this problem,” Josh Scherr explained.

“

We knew the game was good when we finished it, but we were miles away from thinking [winning so many awards and accolades] would happen.

“You’re doing the work, but you don’t necessarily have the big picture view of what you’re doing. There was some point, I think in beta, where it just hit me. I remember walking into Evan’s office and saying, ‘dude, this is going to blow up.’”

Evan Wells notes that the game’s success “absolutely” surprised him.

“We knew the game was good when we finished it,” Christophe Balestra added, “but we were miles away from thinking [winning so many awards and accolades] would happen. Even today, it’s almost ridiculous. I don’t know if it’s going to happen again. But we were totally caught by surprise.”

“I think it’s a Naughty Dog cultural thing that we just don’t crank out a version [of a game] every year or every two years. That’s not our thing…” Bruce Swanson said. “You don’t want to rest on your laurels. So that goes without saying… With the success of [Uncharted 2], there were some moments that were like, ‘what now?’ You get to the top of that and it’s sort of like, some people think this is the best game of the console’s lifetime.”

“I don’t know if Christophe wants me to tell this,” he went on, “but one day – because, at the time, he lived close to me – he needed a ride while he was getting one of his cars worked on. So I picked him up at his house. This was shortly after the game had shipped. It was one of those reflective things, where we were talking about how great Uncharted 2 was.”

“What he said was kind of interesting. I don’t think this has turned out to be true. As a matter of fact, I think we proved it’s not true, especially with The Last of Us. But he said, ‘yeah, it’s so amazing how that came together… that could end up being the best game any of us work on in our careers.’”

“[It] was both kind of a cool thought, but also kind of a depressing thought. I thought about it. I thought, well, this isn’t that far from records. You’ve got Pink Floyd with Dark Side of the Moon. All their records are good, but that’s it, man. You get there and there’s only one way. So it’s something you do consider sometimes. But in true Naughty Dog style, it’s just onward and upward.”

It seemed that Naughty Dog’s newest game was winning every award out there. “It was just Uncharted 2,” Pangilinan said. “When it came out, suddenly everyone knew us.”

“It was pretty amazing,” Reuben Shah added. “When we were getting BAFTAs, I was like, ‘holy crap, I’m holding a BAFTA.’ We had like six of them.”

“

There were a lot of games out there at the time, but they were hating on us because we took every single award. Sorry, guys.

“We’d never gotten anything before,” Pangilinan admitted. “Look at our display [case]… like 90 percent of that is just Uncharted 2, that one title… There are a lot of games out there that are really amazing. It was almost embarrassing, with Uncharted 2, because a lot of our competitors just got shutout. They got nothing. We might as well have just stayed up on the stage. But a lot of them were actually really good.”

“Yeah. There were a lot of games out there at the time, but they were hating on us because we took every single award. Sorry, guys,” Shah said with a laugh.

As the visionary behind Uncharted’s characters, stories, and its overarching universe, the success of the sequel perhaps surprised Amy Hennig the most. “When you’re down in it all, all you see is all the terror of everyday game development, all the things that are going wrong,” she said. “You can’t see the pieces. People don’t realize what a tremendous and sustained act of faith game development is, because you really can’t see the pieces coming together until maybe two months from the end. Maybe less.”

“You have all of these people all working in unison on all their little parts, and you can’t really see how they’re going to fit together. Everybody’s just gotta keep going on the faith that they trust each other. It all worked before. We’ll get it all put together. Then, at the very end, all this stuff starts going in and working. People are like, ‘oh my god, I can see the game!’”

With Among Thieves behind them, it was time to move on to Uncharted 3.

“It was a mystery before. It was a bunch of broken stuff that didn’t link together. You couldn’t tell if it was going to be fun. Then it just starts to coalesce at the very end… We were so up to our eyeballs. You just can’t see it objectively. Then we realized, ‘oh my god, we’ve really got something here’… But no, I don’t think we even foresaw how well it would come together or how it would be received. Sometimes, these things are just the right product at the right time in the right climate. I don’t know. It’s one of those weird lightning in the bottle things that’s hard to repeat.”

But things wouldn’t be grand forever, and the studio would have to at least attempt to repeat Uncharted 2’s success. Naturally, it was hard for the studio to figure out where to go from there, or how it could possibly follow-up something as grandiose and well-received as Among Thieves.

“You have this crazy, incredible achievement, and you’re like, ‘oh, now we gotta match it. Fuck…’ Now we’re going to do Uncharted 3. What can we do? Let’s have them fall out of an airplane!” Shah said, jokingly.

“

We feel an enormous amount of pressure with every game we make. It has our name on it.

“We feel an enormous amount of pressure with every game we make,” Evan Wells admitted. “It has our name on it. We want to deliver something that’s going to entertain millions of people. We don’t want to disappoint them. So I don’t think we’re driven by pressure to make the game of the year, a game that’s going to win awards.”

“We just make what we think is right,” Christophe Balestra picked-up. “You can’t go that way. That would be impossible, trying to please everyone.”

“The pressure [of] Uncharted 3,” Taylor Kurosaki said. “We’ve never, in our studio’s history, been in a situation where you could feel the anticipation for this game coming out. Before we even started on it. It was nuts. It was weird. It was the first time we didn’t feel a bit like the underdog. It was the first time we didn’t feel under the radar. We knew, in our hearts, that we still are these underdogs. But the expectation was for greatness.”

“I just remember after the euphoria of the crazy-amazing review scores coming out after Uncharted 2. It was just, ‘oh fuck, how are we going to top this?’” Josh Scherr added.

“Uncharted 3 was the accumulation of all the things we couldn’t do in 1 and all the things we couldn’t do in 2, and now a whole huge community with expectations. How do you beat Uncharted 2? Those were the pressures for Uncharted 3,” Tate Mosesian said. “If I squinted my eyes, Uncharted 2 was the better game all the way through. But I actually like Uncharted 3 a little bit better. It spoke to me a little bit more.”

“The huge plot holes and weird storylines that just get dropped. You just stop at a wall. ‘Wait, what happened to the tarot cards?’ A lot was lost along the way. But I think at the same time, we were able to smooth that over a little bit with some of the more druggy scenes, where the whole game was just a lot more, I’m going to use a stupid word, but sort of ethereal.”

Uncharted 3’s development was complicated by an issue that was, at this point in Naughty Dog’s history, one it already went through. Sony and Naughty Dog again wanted to attempt to make two games at a time. That means that some of Uncharted 2’s team would move on to a new project, one that would end up being The Last of Us. All hands would be on deck for both titles as needed, and people would often rove back and forth between projects, but there was, for the first time in Naughty Dog's history, two games in simultaneous development that would both, ultimately, see the light of day.

“In a lot of ways, we had to transition, again, on Uncharted 3,” Pangilinan said. “[Part of the leadership] team on Uncharted 2, Bruce [Straley] and Neil [Druckmann], were working on The Last of Us. You had a lot of changes in management that had to be moved over to fill in on Uncharted 3. Those people needed to adjust. On the translation of that, you got Uncharted 3 as a result. I don’t think it was a bad game or lesser, it’s just a different game. It had a different pace.”

“[Uncharted 3] was hard,” Richmond admitted. “It was my first project as director. We were all really tired after making 2. It took a while to get the studio back into functioning shape, just in the sense of people being able to even stand it for eight hours a day. We wanted to shoot each other by the end of 2. Just in the sense of, ‘I have been here for 18 hours, I am going home!’ That kind of stuff.”

“

We were all really tired after making 2. It took a while to get the studio back into functioning shape, just in the sense of people being able to even stand it for eight hours a day.

“But we pulled it all back together. We had a lot of really cool ideas coming off of 2 that we wanted to implement, like the cruise ship stuff and the cargo plane. Those were really early ideas that we wanted to try out. People were really excited. But there was a lot of pressure to make that game be something better than Uncharted 2. In a lot of ways, I think we tried. We legitimately tried. There were a lot of complaints about the game, but I’m still really proud of it… it’s [got] a 92 Metacritic rating.”

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception wasn’t as well-received as Uncharted 2 when it came out in the fall of 2011, but it was still considered a hit for PlayStation 3, and it sold millions of copies around the world. Still, it’s not widely considered to be the major achievement that Among Thieves was.

“Would I change anything?” Richmond asked, rhetorically. “Certainly. But hindsight, right? There’s no doubt in my mind that we could have done some stuff better, but I think there’s a lot of really cool stuff in the game. The narrative is really strong. It made Drake a more interesting character, which was the most important thing. And the hype, [it was] through the roof. I don’t know what you do about that. I think we delivered at a very high level. I can’t complain.”

“Justin Richmond did a great job coming in for Uncharted 3,” Sam Thompson exclaimed. “He’s incredibly talented as well. I thought we did a really good job with Uncharted 3. It was interesting. Amy really tries to create new and unique experiences. She doesn’t want to play on established hallmarks of the genre, but she also doesn’t want to revisit things that she might have hinted to or executed in previous games.”

Elena's relationship with Drake was at the center of Uncharted 3.

“So the whole intro for 3, with the young Drake at the museum, all that stuff was important. It was important to make you believe that Drake had been shot and all these things. But I don’t think we encapsulated the tension that we achieved with the intro for Uncharted 2. Everything from the train car, in that moment, it was probably one of the single greatest intros of any game that I’ve played. Now, I know I’m a little biased, but it always felt that way to me. That was epic.”

“And I think it’s really difficult to follow-up with anything less than epic times two,” he continued, “and then what? We put ourselves in a very difficult situation to follow-up. But the game still reviewed very well. How do you have any qualms with anything these days over a 90 [on Metacritic]? It’s practically unheard of, anyway.”

“I think there are some things we could have done differently. We could have spaced the story a little differently, maybe changed the order of the levels. There’s still some internal discussion on that. But I think Amy was really happy with the vision and the execution. I think that’s what matters. You need people on the studio level to stand up and have some conviction and say, ‘look, this is what I want to do. This is the course and we’re sticking to it.’”

“

I think there are some things we could have done differently. We could have spaced the story a little differently, maybe changed the order of the levels. There’s still some internal discussion on that.

“Our multiplayer, I thought, was really awesome in 3,” Shah said. “It was awesome in 2 as well, but 3 really defined our multiplayer. People still play Uncharted 3 multiplayer. It’s still going. In some respects, as far as story and pacing, I personally thought Uncharted 2 was a little tighter. But the scope of the game is different.”

“In terms of art, what we did, it was much bigger. I can see it, because the outsourcing budget was large,” Pangilinan said, laughing. “That’s reflected in the fidelity of the game. You should also remember, in Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, we globe-trotted. We created more looks. We can’t reuse a lot from our previous games because it’s all from different parts of the world. It’s pretty unique. A lot of art production went into Uncharted 3.”

“You also get bigger set pieces… We focused on that,” he continued. “What did the fans like? They liked all these [set pieces]. It was crazier, the original [cruise ship sequence]. That boat was supposed to be Titanic-sized. You were supposed to run across it. The whole thing was supposed to snap in two. It was crazy. The plane scene, too, was stripped down. You were supposed to have zero gravity fights up in that thing. All of those boxes would fall and you’d have a different setup for combat.”

“All of that never happened because of the scope,” Pangilinan later added.

“Yeah,” Shah jumped in. “We aim high and then see what we can really do. I think that’s how we work… But I’m glad we shoot for the stars, instead of playing it safe.”

“It’s like Jackie Brown after Pulp Fiction,” Tate Mosesian said. “It’s not as good as Pulp Fiction. I’m not comparing us to Quentin Tarantino, by the way. But people had huge expectations [of Uncharted 3]… I think we were just up against something people didn’t want to let go of.”

“Critically, yeah, [Uncharted 3] was a let down,” Bruce Swanson admitted. “But we kind of, I think, looked at it from several viewpoints. One was, what did we do wrong, if we did anything wrong? What is it that was not as satisfying, possibly? There was a lot of introspection with that. Stuff that was actually valuable came out of that.”

“But the other thing was, of course, an understanding that, look, you get to the top of the heap and sometimes that is enough,” he continued. “Fans are like, ‘okay, yeah, been there and done that.’ Some might say that they can get fickle. I don’t necessarily believe that. I think there were some legitimate gripes [with Uncharted 3]. It’s a great game. Compared to a lot of other stuff out there, you might say it’s still awesome.”

“

It’s like Jackie Brown after Pulp Fiction.

“Obviously, review scores and public response are very important, but you want to distill that stuff down and take the most important aspects out of it, rather than just being completely reactionary to things that you read online,” Josh Scherr said. “If you read [online gaming forum] NeoGAF, Uncharted 3 is simultaneously the best and worst game ever made. It’s kind of like Scrodinger’s cat in a way.”

“You have to figure out, okay, what are the complaints that are legitimate and things that we should consider? Versus this person had crazy expectations for the game that they wanted to play, and because it was not the game they wanted to play it is therefore the worst. You have to distill down. What is the important stuff to take away from this?”

“A lot of it is just confirmation,” he later said. “None of the criticism, the legit criticism of our games, has ever really caught us off guard. It’s stuff we’re aware of, and for whatever reason we did not have time to address it.”

“If Uncharted 3 had come out second, I think it would have gotten all of the same recognition [that Uncharted 2 got],” Wells said. “It’s just that what we did with Uncharted 2, I think it’s been mimicked by a lot of our competitors out there. It was bringing these action set pieces to life and making these things you usually see in the movie theater playable.”

“By the time the third one came out, that had been done by us,” he continued. “So it didn’t have the same impact. It didn’t have the same wow factor, having never been exposed to that experience before. Technically, it hits just as many, if not more marks than Uncharted 2 did. There are more moments in that game that I still think are the best in the series. Narratively, there are some scenes in there that tug at the heartstrings in ways you didn’t get in 2. So yeah, I think it was just the order that they came out.”

You haven't seen the last of Nathan Drake.

“But… we still did really well,” Christophe Balestra added. “Maybe it feels like it was slightly underappreciated. But I’ll take that any time. Uncharted 3 was a great success.”

“There’s also something about success painting a bigger target on your back,” Wells interjected. “Now it’s hip to hate on what’s successful. Once all those awards were given to the second one, now people are just going to look for reasons to pick on the next one that comes out. The gaming culture has a tendency to try to dog-pile on successful games.”

“We perfected a bunch of stuff in 3,” Richmond said. “[But] first of all, just the jump in graphical fidelity between 1 and 2 was just enormous. We were always going to have a hard time doing that again. We couldn’t. The amount of time we had, we weren’t going to reinvent the lighting engine… We made a bunch of decisions based on, ‘this is the kind of game we’re making, we can still make it look better than 2, but we’re going to do certain things a certain way because it’s a two-year cycle and we’re going to ship on time.’”

“

Maybe it feels like it was slightly underappreciated. But I’ll take that any time. Uncharted 3 was a great success.

“We just made some decisions on what were going to do… and, yeah, I think if you flipped 2 and 3, people would say the same stuff about 2. There’s some stuff I like better about 2. There’s some stuff in 3 I like better. There’s some stuff in 1 I like better. It’s one of those things where they’re very similar games in a lot of ways, so I think you could mish-mash them… maybe we could make an uber-game to get all the best of both,” he said with a laugh.

“I’ve said a lot of times, that this is sort of the curse of making sequels,” Amy Hennig said. “If your first one is successful, you have a lot of people who all love it for different reasons. Then you can’t just replicate it wholesale, so you have to focus on new things and expand in new areas. You’re going to fracture that fanbase, because some people are going to like what you did, and then some people aren’t. Then you make another one, and you’re going to fracture it again.”

“They’ll be like, ‘I love this part, and I love that they went to town on that, but why didn’t it have more of this?’ You just can’t make everybody happy. It’s hard making sequels, because you also want the feedback. You want to know what the fans and the media are saying and thinking, but at the same time, you can really drown out the internal voice that got you there in the first place. You’re not left alone as much to just figure out what’s best to do.”

“Everybody’s got an opinion,” she went on. “Externally, too. We invite those opinions in by saying, ‘well, I’m gonna go read the message boards or read all the reviews.’ It can get into your head a little bit. To some degree, I think where we took criticisms, some of them were warranted. If anything, we’re probably more critical of our work than anybody. That’s always the case. I think there are certain choices we made that we would make again, because that’s what we wanted to do with the characters, the story, or the franchise.”

“For some people, 3’s their favorite. For some people, 2’s their favorite. You have to just, at some point, accept the fact that you can’t make everybody happy. I think for us, too, given the circumstances that we knew we were going into with the development. We knew we probably couldn’t, under any circumstances, anyway, replicate Uncharted 2, because again, I don’t think that if we made Uncharted 2 again, wiped everybody’s memories and made it, that it would have been as successful, because at that point we also had a lot of imitators, a lot more games like that.”

“I think, again, sometimes, these things just hit at the right moment in time. So yeah, we tried to take all the criticism on board. You try not to let the positive stuff or the negative stuff get to your head too much, although it’s hard with the negative stuff… You get a positive comment, or 10 positive comments, and you just brush it off. Then one negative comment just wakes you up at three in the morning, crying,” she said, chuckling.

“

When you’re a game developer and people say, ‘oh, they’re lazy developers, they try to take advantage of the consumer, they’re phoning it in.’ No. None of that is ever true. At least not in my career in this industry, and certainly not here at Naughty Dog.

“When you’re a game developer and people say, ‘oh, they’re lazy developers, they try to take advantage of the consumer, they’re phoning it in.’ No. None of that is ever true. At least not in my career in this industry, and certainly not here at Naughty Dog. Everybody just pours their souls into everything they work on. That doesn’t mean it’s always going to be brilliant, but that’s a lesson you learn as you get older, or as you’ve been doing something creative as a career. You certainly find yourself not being as critical of other people’s work, because you know what it takes to get there.”

“There’s been a lot of people that have moved from the journalism side into game development… the experience is so different. They realize that there’s so much that folks don’t even know about what goes on, the compromises that have to be made and how gut-wrenchingly painful they are. But you have to make them. You have a responsibility to your schedule and your publisher at some point. Sometimes that compromise is made because something else could be made better. But how do you communicate that? You can’t.”

“At the end of the day,” she concluded, “the product has to speak for itself. You have to put it out there and let it live or die on its own merits. But I’m proud of everything that we’ve done. I’m proud of all three games.”

But Uncharted wouldn’t be the only series Naughty Dog would hang its hat on. While Uncharted 3 was being created, another team worked in secret on a game very different from anything the studio had ever done before. And it would, for many, surpass anything Naughty Dog had accomplished in its history.